Twitter @replies Saga: Oops, But the Feature Isn’t Coming Back

Twitter let itself twist slowly, slowly in the wind this week when it changed an arcane feature — and then its story about what had happened. But co-founder Biz Stone is taking pains now to apologize for what he called “the replies kerfuffle,” while re-emphasizing that the feature won’t be coming back.

Like all successful social networks, Twitter has developed a venue that puts strangers in a peculiar proximity to one another without it seeming totally creepy. And while a communications lapse by a company in the communication business is worth a couple of laughs, it’s hard to see this as much more than a trumped-up tempest fueled by the sense of entitlement we have over the internet, another reminder that consumers believe that they own the brand.

The feature at issue, the @replies option — a non-default setting to monitor a conversation (half of it, anyway) between someone you follow and someone you don’t, was only used by 3 percent of the Twitter universe, Stone blogged Thursday. In truth its use is a little mind-bending even by the standards of an asymmetrical social network. You see only what the person you follow says in reply to a Tweet you didn’t see from someone you don’t know. I opted in for a while, but the signal-to-noise ratio — especially on a mobile phone, where I follow my most closest contacts — became excruciating.

It may not have had many users but it suddenly had many supporters outraged that Twitter had acted unilaterally and without warning, the sort of thing that habitually gets Facebook into hot water, and a barrage of #fixreplies and #twitterfail ire was unleashed. When the tweets hit the fan Stone said the feature was jettisoned because it was “undesirable and confusing.” Now Stone is eating crow, saying “I did not do my homework.” But he’s also saying you can’t have it back.

“… We cannot turn this setting back on in its original form for technical reasons and we won’t rebuild it exactly the same for product design reasons,” Stone blogged Thursday, perhaps unwittingly revealing just how sensitive the Twitter infrastructure is.

“Even though only 3% of all Twitter accounts ever changed this setting away from the default, it was causing a strain and impacting other parts of the system,” Stone wrote. “Every time someone wrote a reply Twitter had to check and see what each of their followers’ reply settings was and then manifest that tweet accordingly in their timeline—this was the most expensive work the database was doing and it was causing other features to degrade which lead to SMS delays, inconsistencies in following, fluctuations in direct message counts, and more.”

Wow.

So why would you even want to eavesdrop on half a conversation anyway, which is about as satisfying as putting up with the phone calls of the person in the next cubicle? Many who pushed back said the feature was a great discovery tool, a way to find other users with some likely affinity by virtue of being someone who is followed by someone you follow — call it one degree of separation instead of a serendipitous find on the public timeline or in a search.

Twitter itself is pushing the follow-feeding frenzy by suggesting to possible Twitterers that new signups may wish to follow to get the ball rolling. Wired.com on Thursday published its own list of 100 geeks you need to follow and the story got more attention, I suspect, than any of us would have imagined.